


Discovery on Beast Island

by Jen_Kollic



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-04
Updated: 2019-08-04
Packaged: 2020-07-31 06:15:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20110471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jen_Kollic/pseuds/Jen_Kollic
Summary: Eventually Hordak discovered that Catra had both lied to him about Entrapta and had her sent to Beast Island. He knew he'd find her eventually... but he'd never wanted to find her like this. Inspired by a prompt on etherian-affairs on Tumblr.





	Discovery on Beast Island

Hordak had known that he would find her eventually. Even without Emily’s help - when it had become apparent that the bot just couldn’t navigate the swamps and thick jungle of Beast Island with enough speed to keep up with him, Hordak had ordered her to wait back at the extraction point. Emily had ignored him of course, but she was days behind him by now and that was assuming she hadn’t gotten hopelessly tangled in iron-hard thornwhip again. Imp had only managed to keep up thanks to his ability to fly from branch to branch, and even then there were times when Hordak had nearly lost him. With no ability to track Entrapta’s location and no functional maps – like the Crimson Waste, Beast Island played havoc with any navigational devices – Hordak had resorted to a simple inward spiral search pattern that was now marked out by the corpses of the native creatures which had dared to confront him. He had never lost faith that he would find Entrapta eventually, and so he had. As he’d stepped into a clearing created by the collapse of one of the huge jungle trees, he found her curled in the shadow of its buttress roots that clawed at the air like the hand of a drowning man.

It looked like she had been dead for several days.

For the first few moments, Hordak stared at Entrapta’s body with what appeared to be detached indifference – as if this was a mere curiosity and not what he’d been seeking for the past week or more. He heard Imp shriek, the little creature’s shadow flickering over him as he flew to the fallen tree and landed amidst the grasping roots. Hordak watched with the same impassiveness as Imp paced back and forth along the fallen trunk, chittering in distress as he looked down at the crumpled body beneath it. Eyes wide, Imp looked at Hordak pleadingly as if he wanted him to deny what they both were seeing. When he got no response, the little creature had the audacity to hiss at him angrily, then jumped down beside Entrapta’s still form and curled himself into a ball at her feet. Even his anguished whimpers sounded reproachful.

Hordak closed his eyes tightly to block out the sight before him, mentally counting to ten. He had to restart the count several times as vivid, graphic images of what he was going to do to Catra for this betrayal interrupted him. At least those were better than his memories of the last time he’d seen Entrapta before his treacherous captain had sent her here. The girl was a genius. She had seen the flaws in his original armour – armour that had been cutting edge even amongst the Horde proper – and made a replacement that was superior in every aspect with only her own intelligence and intuition to guide her and none of the years of training and study that a Horde engineer would have received. Hordak was willing to bet that even in Horde Prime’s own court there was no-one who had the same instinctive grasp of technology that Entrapta did. And once she had access to true Horde technology – not just the limited resources he’d managed to salvage – Entrapta would soar. He’d show her functioning starships. Orbital platforms. Solar systems. Nebulae. The entire universe outside this thrice-damned starless and sunless hell planet. But to do so, he had to be mistaken. This was not Entrapta’s corpse. This was some other fool who’d been exiled here. When he opened his eyes he would see that, rouse Imp and continue his search.

When Hordak opened his eyes, the body was still there and still Entrapta’s. An Entrapta who had been mauled and savaged by dreadful claws and teeth, her clothes hanging in shreds, a pale knob of bone gleaming at her uppermost shoulder where one arm had been torn away, most of her face shrouded by a tangle of lank purple hair which spiraled around her body as if she’d been trying to shield herself with it when she’d met her end. He could just make out a sliver of her mask through the hair, a cracked magenta lens seeming to gaze straight at him with mute appeal.

_“I like being friends with you too.”_

His eyes burned, so Hordak closed them again but this time his head drooped in defeat. Catra would pay for this – pay dearly and slowly – but she was only one of the culprits. First he would find the beast or beasts that had done this – even if he had to exterminate all life on this cursed island – and he would kill it with his bare hands. Thanks to the armour Entrapta had made for him, killing with his bare hands was at least eighty percent more efficient than it had been in his old suit. But before that… he couldn’t leave Entrapta’s body to suffer any further indignities from scavengers. Releasing a deep, shuddering breath Hordak raised his head and blinked until his vision cleared then approached the fallen tree and knelt by the dead princess. He was reaching out to lift the body when he realised that despite its condition there was no smell of decomposition.

“Wait, don’t!” Hordak had just made that realisation when the shout came from above and behind him. Imp bounced to his feet with a hiss of surprise as a length of purple hair looped around Hordak’s chest and hauled him away from the body with enough force to send him sprawling on his back. “It’s just a decoy, it’s trapped!” If Entrapta’s body had been in front of him, then standing over him was Entrapta’s ghost – missing her mask and overalls but unmistakably Entrapta.

Imp stared at the apparition, then back at the body beneath the tree, then back at the decidedly less clothed and less dead Entrapta. Flying back up to the tree trunk, he crouched among the roots and hissed furiously in obvious bewilderment. Hordak ignored him.

It took a moment for Hordak to get back to his feet as he suppressed the undignified urge to catch hold of the princess and pull her close to confirm that she was actually real. As he stood, he cleared his throat awkwardly. “It… it was a convincing decoy,” he said with as much composure as he could muster.

“Thanks! I did the best I could with what I had to work with,” Entrapta replied cheerfully. “Luckily I found a skeleton that was roughly my size and I faked up most of the rest with clay. The hair was the hard part but eventually I found some roots that made a good dye and used it to colour coconut fibre. It had to be convincing because I thought Catra might try to make sure I was dead so it was supposed to fool her. If you’d tried to move it the bomb in the chest cavity would have gone off!”

There was a long, awkward silence broken only by Imp’s continued hissing. Apparently he was taking Entrapta’s fake corpse as a deliberate attempt to upset him.

“That… is understandable,” Hordak replied eventually. “Very resourceful.” Taking a step towards Entrapta, he hesitated then reached out to put both hands on her shoulders. They were solid, warm and the bones were more prominent than he remembered. “I’m… relieved that you are unharmed. Your absence has been detrimental to my work.”

“Is that why you came to find me?” Entrapta asked. “I was worried about what Catra would tell you – probably that I’d betrayed you and gone back to the Rebellion, right?”

“Right.” The word came out as a snarl between Hordak’s gritted teeth, but as he looked down at Entrapta his expression softened. “When I found out she lied, and where she had sent you, I came to retrieve you. You are valuable to me. Not just because of your usefulness – your value to me is more than that. I find your presence… acceptable.”

“Awwwww, I missed you too.” Pushing herself up onto her ponytails, Entrapta seemed to hesitate herself, and then hugged him. With a certain level of reservation Hordak returned the embrace, noting that the princess was definitely thinner after her time here, to a degree that caused him some concern. As if a mutual tolerance had been reached, they both separated after only a few seconds. “So, uhm, what happened to Catra?” Entrapta queried. “I guess you were pretty mad when you found out she lied to you again.”

“She not only lied to me, she put your life in danger for her own paltry ambitions,” Hordak growled, eyes narrowing. “She is in a cell in the Fright Zone awaiting my return, but given that you suffered the most from her actions I will allow you to decide her fate.” Something that might have been concern flickered across Hordak’s face. “I hope you don’t intend to use her to retrieve more First Ones technology. She cannot be trusted.”

“Oh I know that now,” Entrapta’s voice was reassuring. “I saved her life before and she shot me in the back then sent me here to die. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t mad about that. I did plan to explode her if she came here, but if she’s back at the Fright Zone then I could do something more useful with her. I read about an experiment that this scientist called Schrodinger did with a cat and a box…”

**Author's Note:**

> As much as I love an emotional gut-punch, I love subverting them too. I wrote this at 3am and I was cackling like Skeletor (champion baby thrower and arm stealer 2019) the entire time. 
> 
> I'm a terrible person.


End file.
